Ok, the game is shit. Reeealy bad. This comes from someone who loved Twitcher 3. Steam says i clocked 13 hours so far. I like to take my time, so i'm right just after the prologue. I took my time tweaking the settings, i tried 2 different openings took a couple of side quests and roamed the city for a while. This is what i have to say.
The positives:
- I guess the narrative is pretty solid. Characters and narratives are CDPR's strong point since their first game. Nothing blew me away up to this point, but it's solid, they still keep their bar above competition. I found Jackie surprisingly likeable, although the devs cut their corners and try to inject you with the feels in a breakneck pace. Nothing exceptional so far, but it just works.
- The dialog system when you can speak to multiple characters and/or interact with the environment (when it's scpripted) is quite a game changer. This is a novelty i hope will get adopted in other AAA RPGs.
- Corporate opening feels right. You start from the position of power and privilege and you can feel it.
- Night city feels big, mostly due to its verticality. On the surface it really adds another layer to the game. But...
The negatives:
- Night City lacks any character. Regardless of the clutter it's empty and shallow. NPCs are there just to fill the screen, there's no hint of any sort of simulation running undearneath. Traffic is artificial, encounters are hand placed and static.
- There are no side activities. There's nothing exciting to do. You get cars by doing side quests, you can't just buy a car. You can't change your looks past the character creation screen. Gun customization is almost nonexistent (you can add a scope and silencer to most guns, that's it).
- You can't join a gang, you can't join a corp, you can't role play your character that way. All you can do is a random selection of side quests.
- Looter shooter intemization. It's shit. It was bad in TW3, but here it's just unbareable. It has a gigantic impact on the shallowness of this game. You're showered with all kinds of weapons, you don't grow attached to any specific weapon because it will get replaced in a flash. Sifting through the inventory screen every couple minutes just to look for single digit uprgrades to your prefered weapon class DPS changes is tedious and tiresome. Even the goddamn color coding doesn't help, most often white, common weapons have better stats than their green counterparts. And greens don't have a single characteristic that makes them stand out from commons. More mod slots? Nah. Additional damage effects? Nope. Alternate attack modes? You wish. Color coding is used in loot grinding games to make you choose the best gear intuitively, here it just adds another layer of confusion.
- Shit stat progression system. It's absolutely shallow and unexciting. There's nothing interesting to get, most skills give you a % increase to damage, marginally longer hack duration, slightly faster movement speed etc. Deus Ex has significantly smaller upgrade trees but pretty much each and every skill point spent makes a difference. This game has skill trees shoved in just because it's trendy. Fuck, even Fallout 4's shitty perk progression system is more exciting than anything in CP 2077, and this is something i never expected to say.
- AI is very bad. Example - i grabbed a guy right in front of his friend, took him behind a corner and snapped his neck. And nobody noticed.
- Game map UI is atrocious. It's barely readable and filled with a ton of icons. For some reason it's also 3D therefore it's even less intuitive. Reminds me of Ass Creed Unity, but even that map was easier to navigate.
The meh:
- Max 2 mod slots on any weapon (optics/muzzle). Bland as fuck. And weapon mods have randomly rolled stats just as pretty much every other piece of gear in CP 2077.
- On my GTX 1080 at 1080p ultra the game looks pretty bad and runs at around 40 FPS. It's a blurry, glitchy mess with jarrig texture and object pop in and awful AA artifacts in motion. It looks good tho on a top notch PC 3000$+ PC.
- Nomad opening sucks. I expected to roam the desert for a while, instead you get a quick mission to smuggle a crate to Night City. The entire Badlands area feels severly underdeveloped anyway.
- The writing is okay. Not bad, not great, servicable.
Bad design:
- All clothing items have stats, so you either pick your favorite look at the cost of stats or you look like a bum wearing randomly found pieces of clothing. High heels, baggy pants, bikini bra, trenchcoat, biker helmet and sunglasses? Looking sharp, samurai.
- Road traffic is artificial. Cars move at snail's pace and thers no AI that governs road traffic anyway.
- Cinematic bits such as car chases are entirely scripted. For example - vehicles always crash/explode at the same moment regardless of your accuracy or the amount of bullets you waste on them.
- Enemies are bullet sponges. What's the point of investing in stealth (adds a damage multiplier to attacks from stealth) when silencers decrese base DPS? Once you're in combat you're left with inferior damage. Stealth breaks when you can't one shot an enemy, and so far i haven't managed to kill anyone with one shot because of the sponginess.
- The UI is a mess. It's mostly a copy paste job from TW3. It's unintuitive, most of the screen real estate is once again wasted.
- NPCs keep calling you all the time sometimes with new quests but mostly they spam you with meaningless messages. Usually you're too busy to listen or read those and they interrupt the game flow.
- Cops just spawn out of thin air when you commit crimes.
- Cyberware is a huge missed opportunity. They could do so much with this part of the game, but nope, it's just as bland as the skill and perk system. Where's night vision or thermal vision? Where's Deus Ex like strength enhancement? The sky is the limit here, but they went with the most bland selection they could think of. Fucking double jump doesn't even make sense.
And on top of all that add an unbelievable amount of bugs and glitches. The game feels half-finished and untested. I guess it was designed and put together by a committee of shareholders. It had to generate maximum hype before release, because it has very little to offer. I bet most of the alleged 300 million dollar budget was spent on marketing because i can't believe you can make a game this bland and half-assed for that amount of money. Seriously, Bethesda could make a better open world game, and Ubisoft could make a better city-roamer out of this.